Dreaming Canvas

Genre: First-Person Walking Simulator / Misc.

Players: 1

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Review:

Dreaming Canvas is an odd, experimental game that doesn’t really fit any sort of genre. It’s a first-person game with no action of any kind, it’s an Adventure game with no story, characters, puzzles, or progression. It’s a game that feels almost like a tech demo, except there doesn’t seem to be any sort of unique or impressive technology on display. It’s… strange.

Since this is not a typical game, I’m not going to give it a typical review. Instead, I’m going to describe my experience playing it.

I fire it up and the title screen is a mix of interesting and bland. It depicts a section of landscape in neon colors that keep shifting, promising a wild and colorful experience. However, the title itself is just the game’s name in red in a boring cookie-cutter calligraphy paint font. That tells me I’m going to be playing something amateurish and constructed by someone who doesn’t really know what they’re doing. But hey, I’m not going to pre-judge a game by its title screen, let’s get to the actual game!

The game lets you select one of a half-dozen levels to play in, and I naturally pick the first one. I’m brought to a low-poly wooded lake area that looks like it came out of one of those early videos people made when they were first experimenting with 3D modeling. Good resolution, terrible amount of detail, awful framerate. Hm.

I haven’t really been given any direction for what to do, so I start wandering around. Holy hell, movement in this game is so damn slow. Just walking around is excruciating as it feels like I’m crawling through the environment. Eventually, I find a glowing paintbrush. Ah, perhaps this is where the gameplay is!

Well, no. Going to the paintbrush brings up a woman’s voice reciting a quote from a famous artist about art. That’s it. Um… okay, back to wandering, I guess.

At least the music is calm and pleasant, albeit not memorable or noteworthy. Okay, the game is going for a chill kinda’ vibe, I can appreciate that. But I’d really like it if I could find some actual gameplay here.

After walking at a snail’s pace for a little while more, I spot a purple light shooting up into the sky, and saunter over to investigate. It’s coming up from a canvas near a very low-poly woman. I get closer and my view shifts and I get some controls.

Here we are, this is the gameplay, such as it is… you are using various sliders to play around with Photoshop filters. That’s it. Oh, you’re not aiming for anything specific, you’re just messing around with it until you find something you like, and then you can “paint” it to the canvas.

So it’s a game where you create your own art? Well… not really. You can’t choose what scenes you’re “painting” – the camera angle is set. You can’t zoom in or out, can’t mess with the lighting, the focus, can’t write or draw anything on the page. All you can do is mess around with the half dozen filters, and call it a day.

This can’t be it, can it? I look in the game’s menus to see if there’s any sort of instructions, or at least a way to walk faster than a snail’s pace. Well, turns out there are instructions, and they only confirm what I’m already quickly concluding – this game has absolutely nothing more to offer me. Well, no, that can’t be right. Maybe this is just a bad sample?

I go to fire up another level, bringing me to a deserted island. Not even any low-poly people here this time, as far as I can tell. I note that there are water-lapping sounds at the beach, but the water itself doesn’t animate, and looks solid. I try walking on it and find that it is solid. I’m literally walking on water. ~sigh~ So lazy…

I walk around a bit, find a few more little quote sound samples and another canvas or two, but none of these is really compelling. Before long, I happen to see that this environment isn’t even complete – they apparently stopped building this level at some point, and I can easily peek up through the scenery and see trees planted on nothing.

At this point, I’m done. While the game presents an aesthetic that is a little pleasant on a surface level, this game has no actual gameplay, and just walking around in the thing is so excruciatingly slow that I’d rather be doing anything else. I’m actually comparing the game to Photoshop and concluding that Photoshop is a better game than this, and Photoshop isn’t a game. With this being the case, there is only one grade I can reasonably give this game.

tl;dr – Dreaming Canvas is a Walking Simulator with no plot, no characters, no puzzles, and the only gameplay comes in the form of voice clips to find strewn about the stages and canvasses where you can play around with Photoshop filters and not do anything else. All of this is presented in incomplete low-poly areas that are torturously slow to walk through. This game isn’t fun… in fact, I’m not even sure it’s a game. But it’s not an art app either. I don’t know who this was meant to appeal to, but I can feel pretty sure that it fails miserably.

Grade: F

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